FGnet is
the European working group on face and gesture recognition funded by the EC
IST program. The Coordinator of FGnet is Tim Cootes, University of
Manchester, UK. Each year, FGnet published a set of benchmark image
sequences on some aspect of visual observation of human activity. Resarch
teams from around the world are invited to test their algorithms on the
data set.

A workshop is organized at a major conference to showcase the results.
Previous FGnet Workshops have included such data sets (PETS'02 at ECCV'02,
and PETS'03 at ICVS'03).

The FGnet network has prepared video
images and sequences of people pointing at targets with their hands and
faces. Data has been prepared by projecting a target on a wall using a
steerable video projector. Subject were seated in a room at a distance of 3
to 4 meters from the wall and asked to point at the target with their right
hand and with their face. Unsynchronized video sequences were recorded from
four cameras placed at different positions around the subject. Still images
were also obtained for each gesture. For each gesture a ground truth was
automatically recorded in the form of the known target position.
Participants will be invited to compete in recognizing or estimating the
target position with three categories of data:

stereo image pairs of hand pointing;

monocular images sequences of hand pointing;

monocular images of face pointing.

Two sets of sequences and still image sets are published on the workshop
web site. Ground truth data is provided for the first set, but withheld
from the second. Participants are required to submit a data file (format to
be specified) in which they provide the target identity for each image or
sequence. An automatic program will be run to compare submitted results to
ground truth for the second sequence.

For each image or sequence, participants are invited to determine:

the precision of target estimation;

the probabiity of failure.

Participants will be requested to describe the theoretical foundations
of their algorithm as well as computational cost of their
implementation.

A one day workshop will be held in which authors present their
algorithms and results. The workshop organizers will present the results
from the participants. Copies of papers will be provided to workshop
participants.